Life Is Short: An Appropriately Brief Guide to Making It More Meaningful

By Dean Rickles

Why life’s shortness—more than anything else—is what makes it meaningful

Death might seem to render pointless all our attempts to create a meaningful life. Doesn’t meaning require transcending death through an afterlife or in some other way? On the contrary, Dean Rickles argues, life without death would be like playing tennis without a net. Only constraints—and death is the ultimate constraint—make our actions meaningful. In Life Is Short, Rickles explains why the finiteness and shortness of life is the essence of its meaning—and how this insight is the key to making the most of the time we do have.

Life Is Short explores how death limits our options and forces us to make choices that forge a life and give the world meaning. But people often live in a state of indecision, in a misguided attempt to keep their options open. This provisional way of living—always looking elsewhere, to the future, to other people, to other ways of being, and never committing to what one has or, alternatively, putting in the time and energy to achieve what one wants—is a big mistake, and Life Is Short tells readers how to avoid this trap.

By reminding us how extraordinary it is that we have any time to live at all, Life Is Short challenges us to rethink what gives life meaning and how to make the most of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Oct 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9780691240602

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Cover: Life Is Short by Dean Rickles

LIFE IS SHORT

Life Is Short

AN APPROPRIATELY BRIEF GUIDE TO MAKING IT MORE MEANINGFUL

DEAN RICKLES

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright © 2022 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rickles, Dean, author.

Title: Life is short: an appropriately brief guide to making it more meaningful / Dean Rickles.

Description: Princeton: Princeton University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022013109 (print) | LCCN 2022013110 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691240596 (acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780691240602 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, approximately 4 B.C.-65 A.D. De brevitate vitae. | Life. | Time management. | BISAC: PHILOSOPHY / General | SELF-HELP / Death, Grief, Bereavement

Classification: LCC B616.D43 R53 2022 (print) | LCC B616.D43 (ebook) | DDC 128/.4—dc23/eng/20220512

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022013109

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022013110

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Rob Tempio and Chloe Coy

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Jacket Design: Karl Spurzem

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To La Belginqué

Well, said the witch, I know everything that’s going to happen to you. Then she remarked that Dominic was unusually wise for so young a dog and offered him a bit of information. I hope you don’t mind if I tell you this much, she said. That road there on the right goes nowhere. There’s not a bit of magic up that road, no adventure, no surprise, nothing to discover or wonder at. Even the scenery is humdrum. You’d soon grow much too introspective. You’d take to daydreaming and tail-twiddling, get absent-minded and lazy, forget where you are and what you’re about, sleep more than one should, and be wretchedly bored. Furthermore, after a while, you’d reach a dead end and you’d have to come all that dreary way back to right here where we’re standing now, only it wouldn’t be now, it would be some woefully wasted time later.

—WILLIAM STEIG, DOMINIC¹

CONTENTS

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xv

1 The Shortness of Life, Redux 1

2 Who Wants to Live Forever? 10

3 People and Purpose 16

4 Diseases of Time 27

5 Project Me 43

6 The Provisional Life 56

7 Bulletproofing 70

8 The Meaning of Death 80

Notes 95

Index 113

PREFACE

Limitation. Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man: if they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless.

—I CHING, HEXAGRAM 60¹

WE DISSOLVE INTO the boundless without limits, says the I Ching. The present book was conceived just prior to, and written entirely during, the COVID-19 pandemic. We were certainly limited by this in all kinds of ways. Right now I am writing this very sentence during a statewide lockdown, like a prisoner, unable to do more than stroll outside for an hour each day and do some essential shopping.

For many, the pandemic has provided a rare pause to the hustle and bustle of daily life. It is as if the world itself is suffering from a midlife crisis. We have had to drop whatever order was present and create new orders in a bid to preserve sanity. Some cope better than others. Some people’s lives barely changed. Others’ were turned upside down. Some have realized that they didn’t much like how their lives were before, all work and no play, and are reluctant to go back to the old ways. Some have become so terrified by the prospect of death from COVID that they have effectively walled themselves off from life and the risks it entails. In all cases, there is an interplay between limit and possibility, but also with freedom. We think of limitations (especially death) as things that disrupt our freedom precisely because they remove possibilities. This book argues otherwise. Paradoxically, limit gives birth to freedom.

I take the above passage from the I Ching to mean that with no constraints, with no limits, no boundaries or walls—if life were to reset to an autosave point as in a computer game—there would be no meaning to action. No consequences. How dull are games without rules and consequences? Not a game at all. The game of life must contain boundaries. And a good thing too. While we are seemingly squeezed by our lack of unlimited possibilities (i.e., our short lives), an unlimited being is squeezed in other ways: it would simply not have any means to enjoy a meaningful existence as we do. It is an existence as boring as the game with no rules in which there is nothing to act against and nothing to act for.

To be a free agent is precisely to be a being who faces consequences. To be an agent is to have to choose, to decide, from a finite sample. It is to let go of some possibilities in favor of others. To prune the branches of one’s future. To let them die or actively kill them off. But to be an agent is to be a creature who can have a meaningful life precisely by virtue of such acts of pruning. To have a good, meaningful life is to have a conscious, authentic life in which actions and aims are aligned and any pruning of branches is done with purpose, rather than randomly snapping them or having others prune them for you. To have a meaningful life, death is necessary: death of the discarded branches (the possibilities that are lost in favor of what is made actual) and the eventual death of the self.

Death is the most necessary limit of all, and without it, all projects are devalued. Death is the source of meaning since it is the very source of choice, of having to decide. Unlimited time would imply that all possible outcomes could occur at some point, so that choice would not even be a coherent concept—it would simply dissolve into the boundless. (Interestingly, critics of the so-called many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics—according to which, roughly speaking, every choice really involves all possible outcomes and you are simply restricted to one branch among many—raise similar issues: if all worlds, covering all possible outcomes for choices are realized, then the very notion of possibilities, of things happening, in the sense of becoming actual, seems to be rendered meaningless.) Death and the shortness of life naturally occupy us for most of this book. In fact, the book is envisaged as a reassessment of the themes raised by Seneca in his classic work On the Shortness of Life.² And indeed we find many of Seneca’s old concerns are still very much present and push their way into all of the themes of this book.

Death is considered explicitly right at the start, where we lay out Seneca’s ideas and dismiss the old Epicurean stance that death is nothing to concern us. We go on to consider the idea of immortality, of removing the future boundary of death, and focus on what that would imply from the point of view of life’s meaning. This is also considered from the point of view of a collective afterlife and the role, if any, played by the continuation of others after your own death. I bundle other Senecan ideas into the idea of a disease of time having to do with our poor decision-making when it comes to our futures (often behaving in ways that might seem to imply we are immortal). I suggest a way of making sense of this behavior and consider ways of curing this disease by thinking of the future as a kind of sculpture that we impose our will on. This idea, however, faces problems from the need to perform a kind of balancing act between a pair of opposing attitudes (each with temporal elements: present-focused and future-focused, or Puer versus Senex) that pose problems for would-be sculptors, forcing the carving to manifest in unintended, problematic ways. We push this framework further, considering the problem of what I call bulletproofing, namely of attempting to make one’s sculpture almost too perfect and invulnerable. We end by pulling all of these strands together, showing how they converge onto the idea of a meaningful life, along with the essential requirement that it be a (relatively) short one bookended by birth and death.

This is a short book, as the title says, because time is precious—before you get indignant, I’m not against long books. While some books need to be long, it would surely be inappropriate for a book on a topic such as this to take too much time away from your short life. I hope you can transform this small investment into a somewhat improved, somewhat enriched life. A more meaningful life. I hope it makes you think deeply and hard, and differently, about matters of life and death.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS PROJECT/RESEARCH was supported by grant number FQXi-RFP-1817 from the Foundational Questions Institute and Fetzer Franklin Fund, a donor advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation as well as a grant [ID# 62106] from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation, the Foundational Questions Institute, or the Fetzer Franklin Fund. It also benefited from an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant [DP210100919]. Thanks to my editor at Princeton University Press, Rob Tempio, for putting his faith in this project, as well as sage advice and several examples that appear in the book, including the utterly perfect opening passage from William Steig.